I just wanted to tell you about a little doohickey that I find incredibly entertaining and downright fascinating – StumbleUpon.

Basically, when you sign up for StumbleUpon (which, of course, is free), you download a bar for your browser that includes, among other things, a Stumble button, a thumbs up button, and a thumbs down button.

When you hit “Stumble,” you are taken to a new website! You check it out, and if you like it you give it a thumbs up. If you don’t like it, you give it a thumbs down. The more thumbs ups a site gets from all the StumbleUpon users, the higher its likelihood of appearing when someone hits the Stumble button.

Make sense?

I have come across SO many cool sites with this thing! It can keep me entertained for hours. Awesome photographs (like this slideshow, which I find mesmerizing and could probably watch for hours), funny videos, informative sites… You choose your topics of interest at the beginning, so that helps narrow down the topics, and if you gives something a thumbs down, StumbleUpon will avoid showing you other things that are similar.

How cool is that?

You can also use StumbleUpon to rank any site, not just the ones that it shows you. If you rank a site that is not in StumbleUpon’s system, it will ask you for a brief description, then put it in the rotation so that others can have an opportunity to view and rank it, too!

You can click here to download StumbleUpon for yourself. And (warning: shameless plug ahead) if you really like me/my blog/making me happy, maybe you would consider giving Makeshift Mama the thumbs up? You can also give an individual post a thumbs up by clicking on the title first so that only that post is visible on your page. That way, if you don’t think I’m awesome in general, but maybe you think my tips for sales consultants were pretty helpful, you can just share that one post with the StumbleUpon folk.